


i bit the hand of god (and now he won't feed me either)

by Wagandea



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: Dark, Dom/sub, Dominant Sycamore, Dubious Consent, Extremely Dubious Consent, Game Events Not Mentioned, Growing Up, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Submissive Lysandre, You Have Been Warned, underage sexual situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 03:24:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15832773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagandea/pseuds/Wagandea
Summary: Lysandre has always wanted what's best for Augustine.





	i bit the hand of god (and now he won't feed me either)

**Author's Note:**

> For Nova, who was kind enough to let me borrow her Augustine and her imagination so I could write this.

                    i.

 

Lysandre is seventeen when he stops praying, but he’s twenty seven when he meets the Devil in professor Rowan’s lab. Dark hair, dark eyes, looking curiously up at him through a sweep of dark lashes; not with the nervousness Lysandre might expect, but with intent of a sort he doesn’t recognize.

Augustine Sycamore is sixteen, and he is Rowan’s newest student. He’s beautiful, in a way Lysandre has never thought a thing beautiful, and later, Rowan pulls him aside and asks him to keep an eye on Augustine, _just in case, the boy does get himself into a lot of trouble_.

There is, at first, a thought that Lysandre shouldn’t be trusted with a thing like this, because it’s from young Augustine that Lysandre learns _temptation_ , and he’s sick with it, feverish and deplorable--

He will learn eventually that perhaps it’s that Augustine shouldn’t be trusted with him.

Lysandre keeps him out of trouble with a guiding hand on his lower back, and if Rowan notices, well, turning a blind eye is the prudent thing to do.

  
  


                    ii.

 

There is, looking back, a moment where everything snaps. Somewhere in the dark spaces between their work at the lab together and Lysandre touching himself in that dark bedroom, he gets a call to pick Augustine up from a party. And _oh_ , he is a glorious mess, coltish and awkward and out of his mind. Lysandre never asks if it’s alcohol or something stronger, but he sets out two aspirin and a glass of water for the hangover anyway.

Augustine ends up on Lysandre’s bed, as he always does. There are too many of these nights to count. Lysandre is, after all, supposed to be keeping Augustine out of trouble, and Lysandre’s flat seems paradoxically the safest place for him on these nights.

Tonight, Lysandre will sleep on the couch as always, though he lingers too long sitting at the edge of the bed. Augustine stretches out over the pillow, deliberately disheveled, too purposeful with his body for sixteen. He smiles and it’s not a comforting gesture. He smiles and it’s dark and secretive, like he’s telling an inside joke Lysandre has never been privy to.

“It’s cold,” he says, and January in Sinnoh is dreadful but they both know it’s a pretense. Lysandre thinks of Dante’s inferno, the frozen center of hell, and Satan with his three gaping mouths. “You should stay, Lysandre. Keep an eye on me. I’m _very_ drunk.”

The Devil is hungry. Augustine’s teeth are white in the dark. He curls up, his head landing on Lysandre’s thigh, curls of black hair spilling over his lap like an inky stain.

There are purple and red marks at his collar. Lysandre will sleep on the couch tonight.

He thinks later that this might be the moment where Augustine began wanting to hurt him.

  
  


                    iii.

 

There are things Lysandre knows about himself that he finds distasteful. He’s old enough to know better when he reaches for himself in that dark bedroom in Sandgem Town, is the point, and Augustine is young enough not to. 

He won’t tell him. Lysandre will never tell him. He presses his face into his pillow and feels not the shame of God upon his shoulders, but his own. Shame settles red over his skin, presses up his spine and pushes his head down with a tight grip on his hair. (Augustine has beautiful hands. Lysandre notices it for the first time in the lab, watching him fix slides for the microscope. Thin wrists and long fingers, but his movements are practiced and anything but delicate. Lysandre gives him a pair of gloves for Christmas, soft black leather that fits like a second skin.)  
  
He doesn’t bow his head for God, not in prayer and not in reverence. This act of submission is not for God; not the way he hides his face in the act, not his hand stroking his cock under the covers, and not the disgust that he feels with himself after. (He’s sixteen. Legally a child, morally one under his guidance. Rowan would be so disappointed.)  
  
Lysandre has always wanted what’s best for Augustine.  
  
(Malva is static on the other side of the phone, quiet for a long time. Lysandre can feel her disapproval from across the sea. It stings, more than he cares to let her know.  
  
Her next words are careful, deliberate, and distasteful:  
  
“And what does God think of Augustine Sycamore, darling?”  
  
Lysandre exhales audibly, closes his eyes. He shouldn’t be speaking about God this way, speaking for God, but Lysandre finds the dogma disinteresting, it doesn’t capture his imagination like the mythology of the thing does. “He finds him captivating.”)

  
  


                    iv.

 

It’s a conversation they have after the thing has broken but before either of them are willing to admit it. Augustine is still sixteen, and he looks very small tucked into the armchair in Lysandre’s living room, knees to his chest, a cup of coffee in his hands. There are good nights and there are bad nights. Lysandre understands this.

Augustine is sitting quietly in Lysandre’s flat instead of _out_ getting into trouble. This is a bad night. “Do you believe in God?” he asks, and the night gets worse.

Lysandre settles into the chair opposite, and the pause is long enough that Augustine, who Lysandre has never known to be anything but commanding and overconfident, looks away. The gesture feels foreign, belonging to someone else, some other boy Lysandre doesn’t know.

Augustine Sycamore isn’t the Devil, but the Devil understands him and that makes them the same. Augustine is slipping. Lysandre’s understanding of God is growing.

“I doubt God cares whether we believe in him or not. Perhaps he finds it amusing.”

And Augustine looks up sharply, dark eyes wide with youth and new ideas. He exhales, and his words are breathless in a way that almost makes Lysandre shiver. “That’s a yes. I thought so.” Then, he asks: “Do you pray?”

Lysandre was always taught not to worship false idols. He meets the Devil’s gaze evenly, doesn’t shirk under the weight of his attention. “I don’t bow before God.”

Augustine’s eyes are dark again by the end of the conversation, and Lysandre ever feels as though he’s given too much of himself up.

Augustine moves in at the end of February, and no one says anything about it one way or another.

  
  


                    v.

 

This time, Lysandre puts Augustine to bed in his own room. There are some constants; the aspirin, the glass of water, Lysandre lingering. Augustine being sixteen and drunk out of his mind. Supposedly.

He puts his knees on either side of Lysandre’s hips in a motion too practiced and too calculated. “ _Don’t,_ ” Lysandre says, harsh and half-mad with wanting, pupils blown wide in the dark. It cuts through the room, but Augustine ignores him. “ _Don’t,_ ” Lysandre says, and his back hits the bed.

(“Do you believe in the Devil?” Augustine asks, and it’s a bad night for one of them, someone, Lysandre hasn’t decided yet. This time it’s him sitting back in the armchair with his hands curled around a cup of coffee, and him who looks away.

Lysandre tries to be dismissive. He’s agitated. It comes off as bothered, instead. “Duality. Hard to have one without the other, God and the Devil.”

“I thought so.” Augustine hums in thought, and his curiosity is a weapon, sharp enough to cut. “He was one of God’s angels once, though. Do you think they were ever friends?”

Lysandre’s breath stutters; he closes his eyes. “I imagine God’s throne room must have been very empty, after he cast the morning star from the sky.”)

Augustine hits the floor roughly when Lysandre casts him from the bed. His hands are still shaking, chest heaving, heart beating in his throat. “Augustine, I said _no_.” He’s hard. He wants, he wants, he _wants_. He’s done something unforgivable.

“You’re no fun, mon chéri,” Augustine breathes, winded from the fall, but laughs and crawls between Lysandre’s legs from his place on the floor. His breath is hot where he places his mouth against the fabric of Lysandre’s pants, lips outlining the hard lines of his cock.

Lysandre stands abruptly enough that Augustine is knocked back again. He leaves him on the floor and locks his bedroom door; and when he’s cursing under his breath and stroking himself beneath the covers with a shaky hand, he tries very hard not to imagine Augustine doing the same in the next room.

  
  


                    vi.

 

Augustine celebrates his twenty second birthday by pushing drinks into Lysandre’s hands under the blacklight of a dark club in Lumiose. They arrived separately, and Augustine plays coy for the first half of the evening, making eye contact with Lysandre from down the bar where he’s seated with a group of friends his own age.

“Not that I don’t think you can handle yourself,” the bartender says, and slides a glass towards him. “But watch your drinks. Another from that guy on the end.”

Lysandre thanks him politely and excuses himself to the bathroom. Augustine follows, of course, and his teeth are very white in the harsh red lighting of the bathroom. So they have a habit of groping for each other in altered states, Lysandre lets Augustine push him up against the tile wall and get his hands under his shirt--

\--but Lysandre doesn’t want to be touched and he begs off citing drinking too much, which they both know is a lie and still never acknowledge it in the morning. He can feel Augustine hard against his thigh, hot breath at his neck, and sometimes when Lysandre’s head hits the wall he wishes Augustine would ignore his protests all together.

He refuses the next drink. The bartender looks surprised when Lysandre settles both of their tabs, and leave together arm in arm like old friends.

Lysandre is too drunk to drive home and not drunk enough to be coerced into sleeping in Augustine’s bed. He stretches out on the couch, and Augustine sets out a glass of water and two aspirin for the hangover.

  
  


                    vii.

 

When Lysandre is thirty five, there’s a pair of heels. Shiny black ones, with red soles and a €600 price tag. Augustine leans on him and jokes that he needs them for his career, and the shop lady looks at them in a way that makes Augustine laugh so hard Lysandre hurriedly escorts him out apologizing.

He wraps the box in black paper and red ribbon at Christmas, and leaves it on Augustine’s kitchen counter. There’s a gift receipt, and an apology for the expensive joke in the form of a pair of soft black leather gloves. His other pair, after all, have fallen apart from wear.

But the shoes stay, innocuously sitting on the shoe rack near the door. He never sees Augustine wear them, but their place moves every time Lysandre visits anyway.

(It’s a joke until it isn’t. He catches a man leaving Augustine’s apartment one night while dropping by unannounced after work. He’s an older man, clean cut, wearing a business suit. Lysandre recognizes him and he recognizes Lysandre, the head of a rival tech company. Lysandre catches the door when he tries to close it. They don’t look at each other. Lysandre creeps into the apartment oh so softly, and catches something from down the hall where Augustine’s bedroom door is slightly ajar, a metal _snap_ like the busk of a corset being unfastened, a flash of dark leather.

Lysandre makes himself a cup of coffee and sits at the kitchen table. When Augustine comes down the hall he’s dressed sensibly but _too_ nice, suit pants and a dress shirt, and those black heels in his hand.

He jumps; looks nervous and flustered and _tired_ , but Lysandre doesn’t ask when he drops the shoes on the floor, and doesn’t ask after either. The list of things they’re not talking about is getting too long to be sustainable.)

  
  


                    viii.

 

“Why did you stop praying?” Augustine asks when he’s thirty, glancing up at Lysandre over the boxes of office supplies and equipment he’s unloading in his new lab. The role of regional Professor suits him, or at the very least Augustine has learned to make other people think it suits him.

Augustine is very good at pretending. Lysandre learned this lesson a long time ago, two aspirin and a glass of water for the hangover--

“I did a very reprehensible thing, I’m afraid,” Lysandre says dryly, and the truth is this:

He’s seventeen and he’s in a car with his best friend. The fire comes later. He thinks he should have known, because Malva has always been a beautiful, vicious thing, and it was only a matter of time before things went too far. _God_ knew. On the drive out to the woods he thinks there are four of them in the car: Lysandre, Malva, the body, and God. God’s in the back seat or maybe he’s the boy’s body _or maybe_ he’s sitting driver, hands on the steering wheel, calmly explaining to Malva that he’d do anything for her, even this.

They burn the body. Fire and brimstone, Lysandre thinks, and feels powerful. He puts it out of his head for ten years, because nothing remarkable _happens_ in ten years. Yes his parents pass and he fast tracks through college, leaves his responsibilities in Kalos to take a job in Sinnoh as Professor Rowan’s assistant, but _ten years later--_

Ten years later he meets the Devil in Professor Rowan’s lab.

“Well, I’ve always known you were a _very_ bad man,” Augustine says, and laughs. Lysandre immortalizes him in his mind like this, beautiful and content to be amused by all the unpleasant parts, the grittiness. “Lost faith in God after?”

“God was with me that night,” Lysandre disagrees, and his voice is grave but something sparks in Augustine’s eyes. “I’ve never felt closer to him.”

“Oh, I see.” Augustine is teasing, and he leans back against his desk, a stark outline against red carpet and dark wood. “You won’t bow to God because you’re equals.” There’s a harsh quality to it, equal parts indulgent and patronizing. “But do you know who God bows to, Lysandre?”

He does; he was only hoping it might remain unsaid, untouched.

Augustine’s smile sharpens. “Let me show you what I did for a living before I won the Professorhood.”

  
  


                    ix.

 

Things that are given up freely cannot be taken. Lysandre has understood this for a long time; he is still not taking his own advice. Augustine at thirty is everything Lysandre wanted at twenty seven, and everything he wishes he didn’t at forty one. “You’ve always wanted to hurt me,” Lysandre observes from his place on the floor, stripped bare, back straight and knees spread apart. Augustine called this position _display_ , and if he wants a show, Lysandre will give him one. “Is it because you knew, or despite the fact that you didn’t?”

“You’re not special, Lysandre.” It’s perfectly degrading. Lysandre shivers, and closes his eyes. Augustine’s heels echo on the wood floor. “I’ve had many dangerous, powerful men at their knees. English obedience.” He calls the position as an afterthought, dismissive. Lysandre has never heard him _cold_ ; it is equally incensing and arousing.

“Aren’t I?” Lysandre pushes when he knows he shouldn't. He spreads his knees further, and is met with the sole of Augustine’s shoe between his shoulder blades. It’s a heavy weight, one he’s had to carry for the better part of fifteen years.

“English obedience. Do I need to repeat myself?”

Lysandre expects this must be as much of an exercise for Augustine as it is for him. Restraint, and obedience. Augustine presses harder. “No, Professor.” It isn’t a refusal, but it isn’t an agreement _either_. He’s gotten good at this sidestepping, this non-commitment.

Things that are given up freely cannot be taken, Lysandre reminds himself as he’s pressed to the floor with the weight of Augustine’s heel on his back, but there are things he doesn’t want to give up and things he wants to be taken. Augustine takes and he takes and he takes. The realization comes fourteen years too late that perhaps Lysandre _wanted_ Augustine to hurt him.

He’s left with his forehead pressed to the wood for an hour, and Augustine doesn’t touch him for the rest of the night either.

 

 

                    x.

 

Forty seven year old Lysandre wears pain and discomfort well, or so he is told. Augustine, apparently, is an expert in these things. Tonight, Lysandre’s hands are bound above his head. Augustine puts his knees on either side of Lysandre’s hips in a motion too practiced and too calculated. He’s drunk, or maybe they both are, and there’s no one left to leave two aspirin and a glass of water for the hangover.

“Say a prayer for me.”

Augustine’s pretty hands are around his neck until they aren’t, soft leather trailing down his throat, over his chest. Lysandre clenches his teeth and breathes hard.

(In a dark bedroom in Sandgem Town, the Devil crawls over him and takes things Lysandre didn’t know were his to give. Sometimes he thinks they should be working through that, rather than replaying it twenty years later darker and dirtier. Unfortunately, they don’t have that kind of time.)

 _Forgive me the sins of my youth and the sins of my age. The sins of my soul and the sins of my body_. It’s barely a whisper, bleeds slow into the air. Augustine slides off of him onto the floor, until he’s sitting between Lysandre’s knees at the edge of the bed. _The sins of my soul and the sins of my body. The sins I have done to please myself and the sins I have done to please others_.

But the Devil offers no forgiveness, and the shame of God is hot on his skin. There are bad nights, the ones where Augustine touches him, the ones where he feels out of his mind and driven mad with wanting, wants to give things freely but has never known the words nor actions to do so--

“Come down, mon chéri,” Augustine breathes against his cock, and Lysandre does.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://wagandea.tumblr.com/) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/wagandea)


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